Web of surveillance

In spring 2013 Edward Snowden, a computer consultant working for a subcontractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA), copied several hundred thousand classified documents relating to surveillance programmes being conducted by the US and its allies in the name of the war on terror, and passed them to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Though nobody believed the world’s number one superpower was totally innocent of any wrongdoing, the successive revelations published since June 2013 revealed a spider’s web of surveillance.

The Prism programme allows the NSA to collect data (emails, telephone conversations, contacts, videos) in a targeted manner from major US digital companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The XKeyscore programme uses several hundred servers distributed across the world to store information on the activities of every Internet user (emails, search requests, websites visited, posts on social networks).

The documents Snowden leaked also reveal that the NSA (often in collaboration with British signals intelligence) spies on the communications of China, Brazil, a number of European institutions, UN headquarters, the International Atomic Energy Agency, foreign embassies, diplomats and heads of state and government (including those of US allies), and credit card transactions. The list seems endless. This surveillance can involve physical intervention: NSA agents sometimes build traps into routers, which they intercept during shipping, while the British signals intelligence services capture (and share with their US counterparts) web and phone data by tapping directly into transatlantic cables (the Tempora project).

Snowden, who was in Hong Kong when the first revelations were published, was charged with espionage and theft of government property in the US, driving him to apply for asylum in Russia. The journalists to whom he passed the documents received the Pulitzer Prize in April 2014.